The present invention relates to the processing of an online application, and, more specifically, relates to a method and system for saving and querying context data for an online application.
The lifecycle of software typically involves a plurality of complex processes such as development, testing, and use, as well as management and maintenance. During these different processes, different users will perform a series of operations to the software. In certain circumstances these users must reference actual running data. For example, during development and testing processes, a testing engineer cross-tests a function, command, or process which has been tested by a previous testing engineer but finds a problem in the system. Accordingly, the testing engineer will need to know the previous testing results. Alternatively, a developer might need to obtain a precise problem representation process or compare multiple testing results to find at which stage the problem occurs, or, when the system is installed on a different testing environment or has different builds, the developer and testing engineer need to compare the effects of these factors on the testing results.
Further, after the system is formally online and an end user begins to use the software, he/she always needs a considerable amount of training time and training materials to get familiar with relevant functions of the software so as to be capable of operating the software correctly; if the user may refer to sample data of relevant circumstances at any time during using the software, a more effective self-help system is achieved. As far as software management and maintenance engineers are concerned, they may want to save the system configurations and the results after configuration such that they can compare the data to identify the most effective system configuration or record old system configuration records.
Additionally, if a system has a plurality of versions, an analyst or a newly added project group member sometimes needs to quickly study functions of old versions, and customer service staff often needs to query functions of different versions of systems as required by customers.
Some prior art implementation methods include, from the perspective of testing engineers, analyzing corresponding testing instances based on the functions currently required to study and then retrieving corresponding testing data in a relevant storage space. From the perspective of developers, prior art methods include analyzing code sections corresponding to current functions and then retrieving corresponding running data records based on corresponding codes. However, the above methods are quite troublesome and always likely infeasible. From the perspective of testing engineers, what are retrieved are mainly testing instances and testing logs, neither of which can guarantee integrality and diversity of the generated data during a testing process. And from the perspective of developers, they often are unable to retrieve corresponding running data records based on corresponding codes if the data generated by each step are not stored in the storage space.